What is Website Page Speed?
Page Speed is how long it takes for a website to load when a user accesses it through a browser.
To check your website’s speed for all devices, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights.
Website speed is an important factor to consider when running a website or blog, but it’s even better to consider it before starting.
WordPress Page Speed Considerations Before Launch
A self-hosted WordPress site is used by about 40% of websites on the internet and is highly recommended when planning to start a blog.
The theme of your WordPress site dictates the layout of your site or blog and when developing the theme for your WordPress blog, different ways of developing it have different speed implications for the final product of your blog.
Developing your WordPress theme from scratch will result in the fastest version of your site. By developing it from scratch, it will allow you to add the bare minimal lines of code that are needed for your blog to function, which in turn will reduce file sizes being uploaded to your webhost and so is ideal for speed. However, for beginners to develop their site using code, it involves a steep learning curve.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP knowledge can help in these situations.
A free or paid customisable WordPress theme made available by a developer, could be used for your blog. Such themes would be made available for public use by the developer and would be a good option if by customising widgets and menus, etc, it aligns to your blogs needs.
If you are fortunate, you might find a free theme but otherwise there are an abundance of paid themes available. Spend time finding one that is simple and lightweight, to contribute to good page speed. It’s important to continue to researching themes, as new ones are released for public use all the time.
It is however likely that even though a theme is made customisable, coding knowledge will help to make the most out of it.
A paid option is a theme page builder, such as Beaver Builder. Beaver Builder for WordPress uses blocks and a highly visual, drag-and-drop interface to create the whole layout of your blog and has an $89 annual fee.
Beaver Builder software is complex and while you might think that would mean it would slow your blog down a lot, it has been engineered to be performance optimised, allowing for fast load times.
Ongoing Techniques
File Sizes
Any unused code in your website files should be deleted to reduce file sizes, as a speed consideration.
Webhost
A common occurrence when factoring in website speed is choosing the wrong level of hosting to handle your websites resource usage appropriately. This can be adjusted through choosing the right webhost plan for your website.
Typically, if your site is simple and lightweight, shared hosting from a webhost such as Namecheap would suffice.
If it’s a resource intensive website, perhaps using many high-res images or a large E-commerce store and having lots of traffic, you could consider using a CDN plan, with Namecheap for example. A CDN will deliver your website through a distributed network of servers around the world to your users.
Images
When editing images to be uploaded as featured images for posts and pages, or to use as media, spend some time on choosing the right size for them.
Images that are excessively large will take extra unnecessary time to load and images too small can negatively impact user experience (UX).
Consider using an image compression plugin for WordPress, such as Smush, which also has the ability to lazy load. Using lazy load images will stop images on your blog posts from being loaded initially until they are actually needed.
Plugins
Too many plugins can slow down your website, so it’s better to only use those you need and deactivate and remove those that aren’t being used.